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Friday, November 10, 2017

The Venona Project, Espionage And A Chess Champion

The Venona Project was a counterintelligence program initiated by the
United States Army's Signal Intelligence Service (later the National
Security Agency) that ran for nearly four decades, spanning 1943 to
1980. The purpose of the project was the decryption of messages
transmitted by the intelligence agencies of the Soviet Union,
specifically the NKVD, the KGB and the GRU. During the 37-year duration of the Venona project, the Signal
Intelligence Service obtained approximately 3,000 Soviet messages,
only some of which were ever decrypted. The intelligence yield
included discovery of the Cambridge Five espionage ring in the UK and
Soviet espionage of the Manhattan Project in the U.S. The Venona
project remained secret for more than 15 years after it concluded. Among the Soviet spies identified in the Venona project were Enos
Regnet Wicher (1911-1993) who was a professor of physics at Columbia
University at the time. Wicher was
never convicted of anything, but it was during the time he worked for
the Wave Propagation Group of Columbia University's Division of War
Research that he was a source of information on American military
electronics for the Soviets. According to one source he was "unofficially" banished to Mexico. The Wicher family (Enos, his wife Maria and stepdaughter Flora) were all accused of being spies for the Soviet Union during the 1940s. During World War II Enos worked in the Wave Propagation Group at
Columbia's Division of War Research and was alleged to have spied for
Soviet intelligence with code name was "Keen" and also
“Kin”. He was married to Maria Wicher and the stepfather of
Flora Wovschin, the most active Soviet spy revealed in the Venona project. Maria Wicher had previously been married to Dr. William A. Wovschin
and was the mother of Flora Wovschin. Maria's code name in Soviet
intelligence and in the Venona project is "Dasha". Flora Don Wovschin was born in 1923 in New York City. She attended
the University of Wisconsin, Columbia University and Barnard College.
At Barnard she was active in the American Students Union and may have
been a member of American Youth for Democracy. She attended Barnard
with Marion Davis Berdecio and Judith Coplon, both of whom Wovschin
later recruited into service for the NKVD. From September 1943 to February 1945 she worked in the Office of War
Information then transferred to the United States Department of State.
She resigned from the State Department in September 1945. The most
active secret agent during WWII, Wovschin acted as courier for Soviet
intelligence. After the war she renounced her American citizenship and travelled to
the Soviet Union where she married a Soviet engineer. An FBI
counterintelligence report on Wovschin has a hand written note in the
margin stating she may have died serving as a nurse in North Korea.
Her code name in Soviet intelligence and in the Venona project is
"Zora". Enos and Maria were members of the U.S. Communist party and Maria was
aware of both her husband's and her daughter's work. The December 8, 1955 issue of the Mexico City Collegian, The
American College South Of The Border, ran article titled “Wicher
Combines Work With Study.” Wicher, an Associate Professor of
Science and Mathematics, stated his interest in science began as a
youngster in Rock Falls, Illinois when he skipped school to go
fishing and while digging for worms found an old skull in an Indian
mound. In 1929 when he entered college at St. Ambrose in Davenport, Iowa he
majored in mathematics and graduated cum laude in in 1933. He
went on to receive his Master's Degree in 1934 and later that year
began to study theoretical physics at the University of Wisconsin.
While there he also taught classes. From 1938-1940 he was consulting
mathematician for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Forrest
Products Laboratory. In 1941 he was appointed to head the Department
of Physics at Olivet College in Michigan. He tendered his
resignation after four months after Pearl Harbor and taught radio and
radar physics for the Army Signal Corps. After being medically
discharged in 1944 he was appointed to the highly classified War
Research Division at Columbia University where he contributed to a
highly technical book, Radio Wave Proagation.After the war's end Wicher worked
for five years doing a contract job for the Bureau of Naval Ordinance
as a research mathematician and later as Research Director. In 1950
he returned to the University of Wisconsin for futher study and
published a paper on the Faraday Effect. In 1951 he was appointed
head of the Physics Department at the University of Georgia where he
remained until late 1953.Wicher stated in the article that he
had visited Mexico in 1951
and like the relaxed atmosphere and so moved to Mexico in
1953 along with his wife Maria and son Anthony.According to the history of Harvey
Mudd College in California, in the fall of 1961, three physicists were
added to the Physics Department; one of them was Enos Wicher who
applied from Mexico City, where he had spent eight years as head of
the science and engineering department at the University of the
Americas. Wicher was a very active member of the department until
his retirement in 1975. He was also known at the college for his
competence as a chess player. Wicher, whose USCF rating was in the
mid-2000s, was the 1939 Wisconsin State Champion and in 1940 he was
Co-champion with Arpad Elo. He
won the Championship for the third time in 1951.
In 1952 he was the Georgia
State Champion. He participated in the 1971 U.S. Open in Ventura,
California where he finished 163rd out of 402 players with a score of
6.5-5.5. He was also active in ICCF postal tournaments in the 1980s.
I wasn't able to locate any
of his games.